Sunday, March 27, 2016

It seems Belgium has its own catch & release program for suspected terrorists. Brace yourself. The Wall Street Journal reported several cases of Belgian authorities dropping the ball when it came to nabbing those responsible for bombing an airport and subway last week:

Unbelievable

European counterterrorism agencies have been on high alert since the November attacks in Paris, where the radical group proved it could strike hundreds of miles away from its strongholds in Syria and Iraq. Using Belgium as a staging ground, the group deployed operatives who were deft at crossing borders and blending in with the masses.

Then, like a modern-day Hydra, Islamic State militants regrouped successfully to plot the Brussels attacks right under the noses of the authorities, who are now ruing the missed signals. The attackers went back and forth between multiple hide-outs and a bomb laboratory with chemicals stockpiled in industrial proportions, at precisely the same time police were combing the neighborhood in search of militants tied to the Paris attacks.

Belgian authorities are now under growing pressure to explain a string of missteps that depict a chaotic counterterrorism apparatus unable to process even basic information and keep track of dangerous criminals...

In one of the starkest examples, local Belgian police in the town of Mechelen said Friday they had the address of a possible safe house of alleged Paris attacker Salah Abdeslam in their files since December but didn’t upload the information into a national police database.

Mr. Abdeslam, allegedly the logistical chief of the operation in Paris, which killed 130 people, was captured March 18 at that address after eluding Europe’s security dragnet for four months.

The Belgian government has also admitted to missing an opportunity to arrest one of the three men named as Brussels suicide bombers, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui.

When Turkey informed Belgium it had apprehended Mr. Bakraoui near the Syrian border last summer, Belgian authorities didn’t seek his arrest or list him as a potential terrorist, even though Mr. Bakraoui was a convicted criminal who had violated his parole. While the two countries spent eight months debating his significance, Mr. Bakraoui flew to the Netherlands as a free man and vanished.

The other two suicide bombers in Brussels, Najim Laachraoui and Khalid el-Bakraoui, Ibrahim’s younger brother, were known by police for their alleged implication in preparations for the Paris attacks. Both men were targets of international arrest warrants on terrorism charges.....

The police and judicial failures have triggered a political crisis in Belgium and are a chilling reminder how Brussels has become a hub for militants planning attacks in Europe.

“If you put all facts together, you can indeed put a lot of question marks with what happened at the justice department and police,” Belgian Justice Minister Koen Geens said earlier this week....

The Paris attacks have exposed wider intelligence breakdowns across Europe, which allowed dozens of militants trained or inspired by Islamic State to crisscross the continent, often with fake documents....

The first sign that Mr. Laachraoui, one of the Brussels suicide bombers, might have radicalized came slightly more than three years ago through a phone call.

Mr. Laachraoui was a Belgian national born in Morocco in 1991. In February 2013, he briefly contacted his parents and said he had reached Syria.The family informed Belgian police, according to Mourad Laachraoui, a world-class taekwondo fighter and the younger brother of the suicide bomber....

The brother said family members neither heard from Najim Laachraoui again nor anything about him until his name was mentioned by investigators trying to unravel the Paris attacks.

At the time of the tip from Mr. Laachraoui’s family, Sunni insurgents in Syria and Iraq hadn’t yet announced the creation of the Islamic State caliphate. Their ability to lure foreigners was widely overlooked in European capitals.

Nevertheless, Belgian authorities responded to the information about Mr. Laachraoui by launching a judicial investigation, eventually accusing him of being a key recruiter of youth from Brussels for extremist groups in Syria.

The Bakraoui brothers grew up in Laeken, a predominantly Muslim and working-class neighborhood adjacent to the industrial shipping canal that runs through Brussels...

Both boys piled up criminal records as they grew older. The older brother, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, robbed a Western Union branch in Brussels in 2010, spraying gunfire at police from a Kalashnikov as he attempted to flee, according to his lawyer at the time and government officials.

Mr. Bakraoui was caught and sentenced to 10 years in prison. In 2014, he was released with an obligation to contact his parole officer once a month. He fulfilled that obligation until May 2015.Khalid el-Bakraoui’s multiple criminal convictions included armed carjacking in 2011, according to the lawyer and authorities. The lawyer described him as having a “forceful personality” but “not at all radicalized” at the time.After serving their respective prison terms, the two brothers moved back home in 2014, according to Mr. Karroum, the mosque president. They had to wear electronic monitoring bracelets that limited their movements.

When the electronic-bracelet requirements ended several months later, Khalid got married and moved to a different neighborhood to live with his wife, Mr. Karroum said.

Ibrahim stayed at home and came to prayers at the mosque from time to time. He was polite but spoke to few people, according to Mr. Karroum.

Messrs. Geens and Jambon, Belgium’s justice and interior ministers, said at a parliamentary hearing Friday that Turkish authorities informed a Belgian liaison officer that they had detained Ibrahim el-Bakraoui in the Turkish town of Gaziantep on June 11.

Gaziantep is about 10 miles from the Syrian border and has been one of the gateways used by foreigners to reach Islamic State territories. Three days later, the officer passed on the information to Belgium’s counterterrorism unit. The officer’s name hasn’t been publicly disclosed.

The counterterrorism unit replied with a request for more details on why Turkey had detained the Belgian national, the two ministers said.

For the next eight months, Belgian and Turkish officials grinded away in a lengthy correspondence focused on what kind of threat Mr. Bakraoui represented. A formal answer, according to the Belgian ministers, only came in January of this year, when Turkey told the liaison officer that Mr. Bakraoui was suspected of links with Islamic State.

By then, Mr. Bakraoui had disappeared. On July 14, he boarded a flight to the Netherlands. Neither Dutch nor Belgian authorities sought to detain or question him.

Belgium’s justice and interior ministers said earlier this week that Belgian authorities had grounds to arrest Mr. Bakraoui because he had been violating his parole since May. But his name wasn’t added to Belgium’s national list of fugitives until the end of August, the ministers said.

At Friday’s hearing, Mr. Jambon, the Belgian interior minister, blamed the liaison officer for his lack of diligence.

“We can’t but conclude that not a service, a direction, but one person has been negligent,” he told lawmakers Friday. “A convict who spends years in prison, then goes to the Turkish-Syrian border…You don’t have to be familiar with terrorism for a long time to see that the chance is 90-95% that you are dealing with a foreign fighter.”

Turkish officials said they had shared their suspicion with Belgium that Mr. Bakraoui was a radical soon after he was detained and before he flew to the Netherlands. On Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Belgium of dropping the ball.

“Such incapable governments,” he said. “We detained this guy in Gaziantep, we deported him and sent him back. Those gentlemen didn’t do what was necessary and released the terrorist.”

According to French and Belgian prosecutors, Mr. Laachraoui used a false Syrian passport last year to sneak back from Islamic State-controlled territory into Europe via Hungary. Mr. Laachraoui’s fake passport didn’t raise suspicion.

Authorities learned the information while investigating the Paris attacks. Investigators now suspect Mr. Laachraoui may have helped the Paris attackers make explosives because his DNA was found on several suicide vests used in the French capital.

Investigators also suspect Khalid el-Bakraoui relied on a fake identity to rent at least one house used by the Paris attackers in Belgium. That led Belgium to issue an international arrest warrant for Mr. Bakraoui in December.

In Brussels, the remaining members of the network set out to demonstrate that their violent potency was intact. At about 7 a.m. Tuesday, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, Mr. Laachraoui and an unidentified man got into the taxi in Schaerbeek.

The three men arrived at the airport and walked into the busy hall. Two steered their carts toward check-in counters, according to security footage, while the third man abandoned his luggage and dashed. Shortly before 8 a.m. twin blasts plunged the airport into chaos.

“The third bomb exploded before we could try to defuse it,” Frédéric Van Leeuw, Belgium’s federal prosecutor, told The Wall Street Journal. “Without the perspicacity of someone who checked the security footage, it would have killed dozens of police officers, firefighters and emergency doctors. That was probably the goal.”

At about 9 a.m., Khalid el-Bakraoui detonated the bomb he was carrying in a bag at Brussels’s Maelbeek metro station, killing himself and more than 20 passengers.... Rest of article.

11 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Listen... this is what happens when political correctness takes over a society. All Belgians are taught white guilt and pay massive welfare benifits to those coming into there country from former colonies. Also EU teaching for years now that Muslims are the ultimate peace loving humans. So naturally the Belgian population fears reporting any suspicious activities

Americans are, as we speak, being similarly conditioned. Conditioned to self-absorb into deep guilt. As we experience deeper levels of guilt, we become more and more tolerant of those who would punish us. We know we deserve punishment and we will eventually accept it willingly.

This all came to light eight years ago with the presidential-apology-tours. We admitted our guilt to the world and thus began our journey into retribution and eventual salvation.

2:35 - you're wrong - all Belgians are not "taught white guilt." I went to school there for 4 years. They don't even mention the Congo.Further, your comment about providing welfare to "former colonies" is really off-base, since the only colony was Congo and the Moroccans who live in Belgium were recruited there in the 1960's to work in coal mines because Belgians didn't want to - most of the immigrants in Belgium are northern African, NOT Congolese. Get your facts right.

The sad fact is, we as Americans have very little current, common knowledge of recent history. I suppose if its not on Facebook or won't fit into a Twitter post, no one cares any longer. I listened with disappointment to a NATIONAL newscast attributing the large numbers of Muslims in Belgium to its "former colonies of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco." Sooo sad, the fact that no one apparently even remembers that Tunisia and Algeria were colonized by France, and Morocco by Spain. Moreover, as recently noted here, the large number of Muslims in Belgium and France are North Africans, which was never colonized by Belgium. In the spirit of "liberte, egalite, fraternite" the French opened their borders to North Africans willing to take low-paying blue collar jobs that French natives were unwilling to take. Sound familiar????

We have the liberal elite to blame for this, they have taken over the public education system and systematically tried to wean parental values from children with bogus educational methodology. When there are 3 illogical steps between 1+1=2 that don't make sense and you can't help your children cause you know it is bullshit, children loose faith in their parents and have to turn to teachers and the liberals that have been placed as educators. Common core is nothing more than a well designed mind fuck to undo the flow of values from parent to child by discrediting parents by making them look stupid to their own kids. Why would a child believe anything a parent says if they can't help them at all with their math homework. Pretty sneaky, which defines the liberal agenda right in front of our proverbial noses.

Who is the Hottest Reporter in Jackson?

Trollfest '09

Trollfest '07 was such a success that Jackson Jambalaya will once again host Trollfest '09. Catch this great event which will leave NE Jackson & Fondren in flames. Othor Cain and his band, The Black Power Structure headline the night while Sonjay Poontang returns for an encore performance. Former Frank Melton bodyguard Marcus Wright makes his premier appearance at Trollfest singing "I'm a Sweet Transvestite" from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Kamikaze will sing his new hit, “How I sold out to da Man.” Robbie Bell again performs: “Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Bells” and “Any friend of Ed Peters is a friend of mine”. After the show, Ms. Bell will autograph copies of her mug shot photos. In a salute to “Dancing with the Stars”, Ms. Bell and Hinds County District Attorney Robert Smith will dance the Wango Tango.

Wrestling returns, except this time it will be a Battle Royal with Othor Cain, Ben Allen, Kim Wade, Haley Fisackerly, Alan Lange, and “Big Cat” Donna Ladd all in the ring at the same time. The Battle Royal will be in a steel cage, no time limit, no referee, and the losers must leave town. Marshand Crisler will be the honorary referee (as it gives him a title without actually having to do anything). Meet KIM Waaaaaade at the Entergy Tent. For five pesos, Kim will sell you a chance to win a deed to a crack house on Ridgeway Street stuffed in the Howard Industries pinata. Don't worry if the pinata is beaten to shreds, as Mr. Wade has Jose, Emmanuel, and Carlos, all illegal immigrants, available as replacements for the it. Upon leaving the Entergy tent, fig leaves will be available in case Entergy literally takes everything you have as part of its Trollfest ticket price adjustment charge.

Donna Ladd of The Jackson Free Press will give several classes on learning how to write. Smearing, writing without factchecking, and reporting only one side of a story will be covered. A donation to pay their taxes will be accepted and she will be signing copies of their former federal tax liens. Ms. Ladd will give a dramatic reading of her two award-winning essays (They received The Jackson Free Press "Best Of" awards.) "Why everything is always about me" and "Why I cover murders better than anyone else in Jackson".

In the spirit of helping those who are less fortunate, Trollfest '09 adopts a cause for which a portion of the proceeds and donations will be donated: Keeping Frank Melton in his home. The “Keep Frank Melton From Being Homeless” booth will sell chances for five dollars to pin the tail on the jackass. John Reeves has graciously volunteered to be the jackass for this honorable excursion into saving Frank's ass. What's an ass between two friends after all? If Mr. Reeves is unable to um, perform, Speaker Billy McCoy has also volunteered as when the word “jackass” was mentioned he immediately ran as fast as he could to sign up. In order to help clean up the legal profession, Adam Kilgore of the Mississippi Bar will be giving away free, round-trip plane tickets to the North Pole where they keep their bar complaint forms (which are NOT available online). If you don't want to go to the North Pole, you can enjoy Brant Brantley's (of the Mississippi Commission on Judicial Performance) free guided tours of the quicksand field over by High Street where all complaints against judges disappear. If for some reason you are unable to control yourself, never fear; Judge Houston Patton will operate his jail where no lawyers are needed or allowed as you just sit there for minutes... hours.... months...years until he decides he is tired of you sitting in his jail. Do not think Judge Patton is a bad judge however as he plans to serve free Mad Dog 20/20 to all inmates.

Trollfest '09 is a pet-friendly event as well. Feel free to bring your dog with you and do not worry if your pet gets hungry, as employees of the Jackson Zoo will be on hand to provide some of their animals as food when it gets to be feeding time for your little loved one.

Relax at the Fox News Tent. Since there are only three blonde reporters in Jackson (being blonde is a requirement for working at Fox News), Megan and Kathryn from WAPT and Wendy from WLBT will be on loan to Fox. To gain admittance to the VIP section, bring either your Republican Party ID card or a Rebel Flag. Bringing both and a torn-up Obama yard sign will entitle you to free drinks served by Megan, Wendy, and Kathryn. Get your tickets now. Since this is an event for trolls, no ID is required. Just bring the hate. Bring the family, Trollfest '09 is for EVERYONE!!!

This is definitely a Beaver production.Note: Security provided by INS.

Trollfest '07

Jackson Jambalaya is the home of Trollfest '07. Catch this great event which promises to leave NE Jackson & Fondren in flames. Sonjay Poontang and his band headline the night with a special steel cage, no time limit "loser must leave town" bout between Alan Lange and "Big Cat"Donna Ladd following afterwards. Kamikaze will perform his new song F*** Bush, he's still a _____. Did I mention there was no referee? Dr. Heddy Matthias and Lori Gregory will face off in the undercard dueling with dangling participles and other um, devices. Robbie Bell will perform Her two latest songs: My Best Friends are in the Media and Mama's, Don't Let Your Babies Grow up to be George Bell. Sid Salter of The Clarion-Ledger will host "Pin the Tail on the Trial Lawyer", sponsored by State Farm.

There will be a hugging booth where in exchange for your young son, Frank Melton will give you a loooong hug. Trollfest will have a dunking booth where Muhammed the terrorist will curse you to Allah as you try to hit a target that will drop him into a vat of pig grease. However, in the true spirit of Separate But Equal, Don Imus and someone from NE Jackson will also sit in the dunking booth for an equal amount of time. Tom Head will give a reading for two hours on why he can't figure out who the hell he is. Cliff Cargill will give lessons with his .80 caliber desert eagle, using Frank Melton photos as targets. Tackleberry will be on hand for an autograph session. KIM Waaaaaade will be passing out free titles and deeds to crackhouses formerly owned by The Wood Street Players.

If you get tired come relax at the Fox News Tent. To gain admittance to the VIP section, bring either your Republican Party ID card or a Rebel Flag. Bringing both will entitle you to free drinks.Get your tickets now. Since this is an event for trolls, no ID is required, just bring the hate. Bring the family, Trollfest '07 is for EVERYONE!!!